Make sure this turkey gets REPEALED, not just "fixed" as some weenie politicians are proposing! m/r
Smart Apps vs. Obamacare - Reason.com
Greg Beato from the August/September 2014 issue
Health care costs in the U.S. have been rising so steadily for so long that containment barely seems possible. Even optimists don't dream of cutting the price tag. As its official name-the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-suggests, Obamacare aims for affordability, not radical reduction.
But at a time when we're all walking around with more computing power in our pockets than NASA used to send Apollo 11 to the moon, perhaps we should be setting our expectations higher. Is it really so hard to imagine, in 10 years or so, the advent of advertising-sponsored health care? Or at the very least, bulk-purchased cardiology readings for a Netflix-like $8.99 monthly subscription?
The device that could potentially enable such scenarios already exists. The Alivecor Heart Monitor, approved for over-the-counter use by the Food and Drug Administration in February 2014, is a shell that fits over iPhones and Android devices. It converts electrical impulses from a user's fingertips into ultrasound signals, which are then picked up by the phone's microphone and processed using Alivecor's app. Users can email the single-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) produced by the Heart Monitor to their physicians, or they can pay a small fee to Alivecor directly through the app for analysis by a cardiac technician or board-certified cardiologist within 24 hours.
ReasonReasonCurrently, the heart monitor costs $199. The ECG analysis ranges from $2 to $12 a pop. In comparison, two researchers who published a study in the February 2014 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine queried 20 Philadelphia area hospitals about the fee they charged for an ECG-and found prices ranging from $137 to $1,200.
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